The crew of the Geo Barents rescue ship completed the disembarkation of the 73 rescued migrants in the Italian port of Ancona on Thursday. The ship is the second NGO ship to dock in the port this week.
Sea rescue NGOs and Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi have clashed after the arrival in the port of Ancona of the migrant-rescue vessel Ocean Viking with 37 migrants on board.
Italy's interior minister has denied that political considerations play a part in the assigning of a port for NGO migrant rescue ships to disembark those on board as number of arrivals surges.
The MSF rescue ship in the Mediterranean was racing to help a migrant boat in distress on Monday, but feared doing so might break the far-right Italian government's new law on life-saving missions.
Charities operating rescue ships in the Central Mediterranean are complaining that a new decree adopted by Italy's right-wing government will limit their rescue capacity, thus putting many lives at risk.
The NGO points its finger against Lithuania and Latvia for the treatment reserved to migrants who have been left in the cold, without food or water, at times with fatal consequences.
A two-month-old baby was recovered dead from the wreckage of a migrant boat off Lesbos on Friday. The child's mother is believed to have reached the island and is now missing.
Some of the 248 migrants who landed in the southern Campania port city of Salerno on December 11 had been travelling for more than a year. Many of them were abandoned and lost loved ones. Among them was a 10-year-old unaccompanied minor and a young mother who fled Cameroon, then saw her daughter get sick and die in just a few days during the journey.
A boat reportedly carrying 149 migrants arrived on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa on Thursday. It was the second one to arrive that day. More than 1,200 people are now in the reception hotspot on the island.
On Wednesday, a baby boy was born on board the migrant rescue ship Geo Barents in the central Mediterranean. The baby’s mother fled Libya with her three other sons. A second woman on board was also nine months pregnant. Both have now been evacuated.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has denounced the conditions at closed hosting centers for asylum seekers on the Greek islands, in particular Samos. They believe there is not enough medical staff, and that the "prison-like" camps can "exacerbate psychological trauma" suffered by refugees and migrants.
Doctors Without Borders has called for a European state search and rescue system in the Mediterranean, and for improving the distribution of migrants in the European Union. The owner of migrant rescue ship Geo Barents also said that NGOs are not responsible for the large number of arrivals in countries like Italy.